for a moment
by CeliaBlair24
Summary: Azula is alive, even if she'd expected not to be.


She wakes to silken sheets and summer heat, the waft of coal-smoke thick in the air. The oil-lamps have been dampened, smoldering red instead of blistering gold, and though the curtains have been drawn, clear windows give way to little more than streamlets of moonlight.

"Hello?"

Her voice scratches against her throat, sharp against the silence of the night. At first she thinks, maybe she was mistaken. Thinks that so late in the night, perhaps those who had sequestered her away from brother and enemy have already left. To sleep, to guard…perhaps— then she hears it, shuffling. Feels, when she searches, the flare of flickering flames within a hearth. _Coal fire_.

"Who's there?"

She attempts to sit, takes a breath halfway through. The nighttime is humid, windless, for all that the windows remained unclosed. Sweat beads along her brows as she carefully leans against her bedframe, dampens silken sheets where her hands lay, unmoving. She calls again, barely louder than before. Waits.

Rustling fabric, the curtain bordering bedroom from the receiving lounge pulls back with a snap.

"You're awake,"

And she recognizes this voice. Would have, even if she were bound and her ears had been torn from her. Injured, or tortured or dead, she'd recognize this voice _anywhere_.

"Brother."

He titters so tragically sideways, a limp in his step as he shuffles into her bedroom, curtains drawn behind him. He doesn't speak to her as he moves along, shoulders stiff and hands shaking. He looked well enough.

"Why are you here?"

He doesn't quite stop, but he could never mask his reactions. Not from her. She sees the way he pauses, leans against his foot (the right one) for a little too long, the way his hands stop shaking, only to clutch onto the red of the robe hanging off his shoulders.

"I—"

He huffs, continues lumbering towards her.

"You sound like you've been _struck by lightning_."

The twist of his lips was so terribly bitter, like the herbal _remedies_ mother liked to shove into her whenever she'd gotten sick, supposedly to cure her, though they'd never done anything of the sort.

"Oh hardy har har,"

His smile is thin as he makes his way past her, shaking his head all the while. Like he'd expected it. Like he was amused.

"Does it hurt?"

He pauses by her nightstand, so terribly stiff. His breathing was labored, she could hear it from where she lay. Like water in an organ pipe. One harsh shudder in… a sharp gasp out.

"Figure it out for yourself."

His hands curl around the metal of a jug she hadn't noticed, pour water into a cup one quivering drop at a time.

"Why did you put the fires out?"

She asks instead, when she notices the way he struggles. His hands shake too much, she thinks. His skin is so-so pale, even in this dark.

"We're celebrating."

He tells her, but he does not smile. The words, though she'd guess they were meant to be sarcastic, come out so tired. Like they hurt to say.

"You don't put out fires when you're celebrating."

He sighs—gasps, really— a hand clasping at his chest. The water jug topples over from where he'd meant to place it, spills black against the deep red of the carpets. He doesn't seem to care.

"Here,"

He thrusts the cup into her hands, his own shaking terribly against the bed-frame. For the first time…for the first time since she'd come to, she looks him in the eyes. Pale gold, like their mothers had been. Bitter and sad. Pained.

It doesn't amuse her like it normally would.

"You don't seem very happy, Zuzu."

It comes out only half accusatory. Zuko doesn't seem to care, just slumps beside her, a heavy weight against the corner of her bed.

"I'm never happy."

The words sound closely, merely one hairs breadth from her own ear. She tips her chin slightly downwards, her cup of water clutched in both hands, half-filled. Even in the darkness, his scar looks impossibly large.

Outside, the grumbling of thunder, like those at the start of the rainy seasons. Except Sozin's comet had only just passed, and that had been the height of summer, not any marker of its end.

"When are you leaving?"

The voices carry with the stillness of the air. Young and somber and she recognized them almost immediately. Calling out, she thinks. Harried in a way she'd never heard them before.

She takes a careful sip of her water as he mulls over her question, lone brow drawn, and scar pinched tightly against his cheeks. Warm water from the garden well, heated beforehand. The only type of water she would take when she'd been younger, afraid of disease-ridden worms and sickliness. So like Zuko to remember, the sentimental fool.

She finishes the cup, anyway. Tosses it across the room when it's emptied. The thump of metal against the wall is almost cathartic.

_"Zuko!"_

He startles beside her, his arm brushing against her own as he struggles his way up. She doesn't help him, merely keeps watch of the curtain bordering them from the receiving room. And the curtains do draw quickly, the slide of the fabric thick against the silence of everything else.

"Peasant."

She greets, eyeing up bark-colored arms, the sky blue of the girls dress.

Of course it was her. _Of course._

And yet the girl proceeds to ignore her, eyes narrowing on Zuko's bulk just barely slumped against Azula's shoulder.

"What are you doing?"

Narrowed blue eyes, sharp like the ice she so loved to wield.

Zuko was unperturbed.

"Could you… could we not right now, Katara?"

The waterbender— Katara— has enough audacity in her to look offended. Eyes welling up, the _how-could-you-say-that_ all but prominent in the set of her jaw and the crease of her brows. She looked like a brat. Talked like one to.

With more effort than she'd ever lay claim to, Azula waved a hand her way, smirking all the while.

"You heard him, peasant. My brother and I were having such a _nice_ chat before you arrived."

Zuko's hand around her wrist was weighty, if not unfamiliar. As soon as the girl is gone (stormed out, hair sloshing against her back like creak-water) she lets her hand drop, turns to him, smiling still, knife-sharp.

"Mother would have been proud, you have an awfully similar way of saying your goodbyes."

Her room blurs on its edges, like the world through the worst of summer-heat, the steam above a well-turned camp fire. Zuko sits stoutly in front of her, hands on her shoulders and face just a ways from her own.

"How could you say that?"

Voice thick, but clear enough that she can actually understand him. He squeezes her shoulders once, makes to pull away.

"You should be happy, Zuzu. The war is over. We _won_."

There's a burning beneath her skin, like the crawl of fire ants under the dead barks of fallen trees. She tucks her hands into the sleeves of her robe then, feels up the bandages she hadn't noticed wrapped around her wrist. A pain she'd thought phantom, but could feel so starkly now. Sharp, like the pull of metal the first night she'd drawn them.

"That's _never_ gonna happen, Azula."

Sardonic laugh, more air than anything else. His breath stutters in his chest, she could see it so clearly now. One stuttering breath in, one wheezing gasp out.

"So you're just gonna leave? Keep playing traitor with_ those peasants_."

The voices are louder now, filling the hall, filling her head. For a moment, she isn't sure if half of them were even real. Maybe they were.

Maybe they _weren't_.

The avatar brat only had a handful of idiots on his team, even before her brother decided to be buddy-buddy with him.

A hand in her hair, gentle like they were, those long summers on Ember Island. After hours on the beach chasing the waves, after their own mother would _leave_ to go slumber in her room on the opposite wing of the villa, when her brother would sing her to sleep because she'd always been scared of the dark.

"'_Zula_."

He takes one of her hands in his own. Calloused and cold and so much larger around hers.

"I don't know if you'll care in the morning,"

He starts, awkward, but his voice is strong. Quiet, like the quiet he would use when he used to sneak into her bedroom, sugary peach puffs tucked into his pockets because she'd played with her food and mother was mean enough to take away her dessert. _"It's okay Azula,"_ he used to say.

He doesn't say it now, but it's there in the way he talks to her. Quiet like they were sharing peach puffs under her blanket, scraping of the crumbs and kicking them beneath the bed afterwards because they were thorough and no one could ever know (even though she was sure, years later, that Mother knew, even if Mother never told Zuko off for it then. Zuko had always been her favorite, after all).

"Appa— the bison is going to die in a few days. He's… he's already _so weak_."

He pauses. Mulls over his words. Looks her in the eyes— pale, pale gold, their mothers eyes— and he smiles. A wane smile. The smile he used to use on the little turtleducklings that flicked water at him, the same smile he used to use on her, when she'd burrow under his bed after upending mothers flowers in another bout for her attention. The one that said he knew there was trouble, knew he was probably stupid for letting it slide anyway. The one that said it was okay, that he didn't care.

She curls her hand around his, not quite lacing their fingers, but refusing to let go all the same. The memories where thick now, bounding through her mind like the dark stretch of a thundercloud, heedless of whatever it was she was supposed to be feeling. She had little strength as was, could guess at _why_ that was, why her chi crawled so sluggishly within her, refusing her even the vaguest call of fire.

She didn't quite care. Not now, anyway.

"He'll kill you."

He pulls his hand away. Slowly, like he was reluctant to. Beyond the curtains, the black of the sky brightens with the start of the early morning. The weight on her bed lifts slowly away, and she sees her brother stand before her, shoulders still stiff, looking so incredibly pale.

"Well, he's gotta catch me first"

It's optimistic. So unlike him. It makes Azula frown, try though she does not to show.

_"Zuko!"_

A different voice this time. Another of their bunch, though this one she's less familiar with. Whoever it is doesn't breach through the privacy of her room, and had she the capacity for it, she would be thankful. Zuko's sighs again, smoother than the last, but not by much. His hand rests carefully on his chest, and he titters against her bed-frame, watching the drawn curtains with some sort of trepidation.

"Scared, brother?"

He doesn't look at her, just keeps staring at the curtains. Mother blinks into her vision then, for the first time since she'd woken, a wraith against the red of the drapes guarding wooden walls. She stares at Zuko too, all sad gold eyes and sad, proud smile. Zuko doesn't look at her, either.

_"Zuko?"_

"They'll keep calling if you don't answer."

Mother stands so still beside him, hand over his shoulder, always so eager for him and not her. Zuko turns his back on the curtains and mother both, looking so terribly conflicted. So much more like himself, really.

"Azula, before I go…"

His scar pulls tight against his skin, pinches, where his brow should be. He doesn't quite frown, not the way he used to. But he doesn't smile, doesn't really express himself in a way she could read.

It's a first.

Then he lets out a breath— what should be a breath— chokes over his words and starts again, eyes watering and elsewhere.

Behind him, Mother fades into the shadows, bored maybe. She never stuck around when Zuko didn't care enough to amuse her. _Figures_.

"I don't know if you'll care in the morning, when all the drugs are flushed outta you, and you've got your mind to yourself."

He stops, stares at her. Eager. Sad. Angry, too, though he's refused to show it since he'd woken her.

"But you'll always be my sister."

It clicks then, like a puzzle piece slotting into its proper place. Why she was in her room and not jailed like she expected to be. Why she was alive and not dead or bleeding out. Why he's seemed so considerate of her.

"After all this time Zuzu— the sentiment will get you _killed_."

She hadn't meant herself, but he flinches anyway. Nods.

"But I'm not dead yet."

Optimism. She wonders where he's learnt it.

"The Avatar used to tell me that sentiment was a good thing. Friends, family— even if he's never had one. He was a good kid."

He smiles.

"You still talk out loud when you're thinking hard."

When he pulls away this time, he doesn't stutter in his step, doesn't pause, even as he lumbers down the steps of her bed chambers and towards the curtain.

"_Wait_."

There was once a time when she and Zuko had gotten along, stuck at the hip and dependent on _mostly_ each other. It had been long years ago, before firebending, before Lu Ten, before any of the events that had led them down the path they threaded now. Azula hadn't thought of those times in a while, not in the long years she'd spent honing her skills, her intelligence, the hate that had festered from the green of the grass beneath the trees shading away mothers garden, the turtleducks and music and wonder she had never understood. It was all she could think of now, though, watching silently as her brother walked away. To his death, most probably. In any case, never to be seen by her again.

"…There's an airship."

He stops just before the curtains bordering them and this-all from the receiving room and his newest band of merry do-gooders outside. Azula clutches at the silk of her bedding's, eyes staring resolutely at the open windows, where the sunlight has slowly begun to slink in.

"Where they keep all the pretty things, you know where."

His hands are white-knuckled around the curtain, and his shoulders shake, she can make it out so clearly, even from here.

"No insignia, s'pose to be for recon but, you know how things go around here,"

Her mouth feels so inexplicably dry, but she goes on anyway, croaking out the words.

"The beast can fit if you try hard enough."

And that's that. He doesn't say anything at first, waits through his groups caterwauling his name, the beginnings of the morning's birdsongs. The heat and humidity of the summer air stills for the moment, and it's like all time stills with it. This, she thinks, is the beginnings of where their journeys truly diverge. Where he's off to the gallows and she's…recovering. She's recovering.

"Goodbye, Azula."

Said so quietly, but she hears it anyways. She doesn't say anything immediately, and maybe she should have but… he's gone after a moment, through the curtains and out of her life. She feels an unpleasant sting behind her eyes, like she'd stared at the sun too long. A sadness like drowning welling in her chest, though she didn't know why.

She hadn't cried when he left the first time.

Nor the second.

This seems more permanent, somehow, despite the circumstance. For once, like he'd actually chosen to go away.

And she doesn't say goodbye, doesn't attempt to crawl out of bed and watch him and the remainder of his ragtag group of feel-gooders take off. Just sits there in the darkness of her room, taking in the last wafts of the coal-fire, now smoldering in its hearth, the drying stain of water on the carpet beside the bed, the water jug still tipped over on its side. She doesn't move, doesn't speak. Wills away the sting of her eyes as the mechanical hum of an airship lifts off from the walls just beyond the courtyard, from the hall of confiscated pretty-things. The grumble of that beast, weaker now, like Zuko said it would be.

It's a long moment before Azula comes to again, a longer moment still before she clambers out of her bed on shaking legs, changes from her robe into something more…practical. Easier on her though, to accommodate the scarred welts on her back she doesn't remember ever getting (whip marks, for sure, though the memory of them eludes her). It's not too long afterwards that the horns by the docks are sounded, the remainder of her father's air fleet lumbering back from their journey east.

She watches through her opened windows, winds whipping at clipped hair as the fleet makes its landing. The sun has risen fully now, a blazing yellow mid-sky. Normal, like the comet had never happened.

She hears a thrill off to the side, where a lone cherry blossom tree rests its branches against the palace roof.

Wood-pecking blue bellies, her favorites.


End file.
